


The Uncertainty Principle: SCENE MISSING

by Clarice Chiara Sorcha (claricechiarasorcha)



Series: Logical Fallacies [2]
Category: The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011)
Genre: M/M, Pseudo-Incest, missing scene from a larger whole
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-31
Updated: 2012-03-31
Packaged: 2017-11-02 20:15:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/372958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claricechiarasorcha/pseuds/Clarice%20Chiara%20Sorcha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is sort of a holding place for missing scenes from the much longer fic <i><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/346088/chapters/561964">The Uncertainty Principle</a></i>, being that said fic is entirely from Jane's POV and there are many and myriad things going on in the background of that fic that she simply could never see for herself.</p><p>At this stage there's just the one missing scene, taking place between chapters seven and eight, but I suspect more will come. In fact, if you were wondering what really happened at some stage or another -- whether it's Thor and Tony's bromantic training sessions, Darcy and Coulson arguing over who would win in an epic smackdown between Voldemort and Jadis, Loki reprogramming JARVIS to talk like GLaDOS, drunken!Tony getting an entire SHIELD installment to LARP <i>Oregon Trail</i> with him,  or Clint reading the mission updates from New York and <i>laughing his arse off</i> --  you can always comment and ask me if the words are there. Chances are, I can pull them out of my head for your amusement. ^_~</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Uncertainty Principle: SCENE MISSING

**Author's Note:**

> This is the "infamous" missing scene between chapters seven and eight. I...yeah. Enjoy?
> 
> Oh, and just for fun: I had Imogen Heap's _The Walk_ in my head the whole time I wrote this. It worked...perhaps rather too well.
> 
>   
> _Inside out, upside-down twisting beside myself,  
>  Stop that now; you're as close as it gets without touching me,  
> Oh no, don't make it harder than it already is,  
> Mmm, I feel a weakness coming on._  
> 
> 
>   
> _It's not meant to be like this, not what I planned at all,  
>  I don't want to feel like this, Yeah,  
> No it's not meant to be like this, not what I planned at all,  
> I don't want to feel like this, so that makes it all your fault._  
> 
> 
>   
> _Big trouble losing control,  
>  Primary resistance at a critical low,  
> On the double gotta get a hold,  
> Point of no return one second to go,_  
> 
> 
>   
> _No response on any level, red alert this vessels under siege,  
>  Total overload, systems down, they've got control,  
> There's no way out, we are surrounded,  
> Give in, give in and relish every minute of it_  
> 
> 
>   
> _Freeze, awake here forever, I feel a weakness coming on._

Loki knew that his brother would come to him here. It would have been simplicity itself to run further, to take himself to a place where he could not be easily found – but even had his magics not been so unreliably depleted, he simply could not find the strength to do so. For that reason alone, he could not allow himself the slightest surprise when the voice floated out of the darkness behind him.

“I would speak with you, brother.”

Expected as they were, the words burned; Thor gave them so freely, in a manner so conversational it seemed he truly believed that none of this was his fault. Turning, Loki surrendered to the absolute fury that had smouldered within him from the moment Thor had thrown himself between Loki and the otherworld beast. With it came the desire to just raise his hands, to project it all at him in one cold clear shot. But he didn’t want to kill him.

Somehow, knowing that hurt more deeply than anything else.

His footfall, despite his exhaustion, made a quick and purposeful beat across the roof. As Loki pressed his hands upon that broad chest, that of Asgard’s golden son, he knew there was no way that he, the shadowy second prince, could hope to hurt him physically. All he truly had was words and the magic that could be wrought with them whether spoken or merely thought. Yet in the rising heat of the moment he shoved him anyway. “You _idiot_ , Thor,” he stormed, not caring a whit that his brother was the one who held the epithet of _thunderer_ , “how dare you do something that stupid?!”

“How dare _I_?” Thor caught himself from falling with no discernible effort, his own anger sparking to sudden life as Mjölnir gave a warning hum at his side. “I have always trusted you before to take care of yourself, to attend to your safety in battle. And yet here I turn my back on you and the next moment you stare death in the face with all the sense and reaction of a frightened child!”

He drew a hissing breath, spat it back in his face. “I was _distracted_.” _Not that I expect you to understand that; when within the throes of battlelust you never see the world without until all the blood has been spilled from its screaming throat!_ he thought, and the smile he tried to wear over his wretchedness burned like acid. “Battles are not all swords and shields and giant oversized hammers that shoot lightning, Thor.”

“I don’t give a damn what you _think_ battle is.” Darting to one side, Loki just skipped away from the range of Thor’s reaching hand; his brother’s frown deepened. “I know that you _know_.”

“You know _nothing_.” With his own hands fisted at his side, he poisoned each word with lilting scorn. “Perhaps it was nothing simpler than the fact I had decided my debt had been repaid. Perhaps I was just _done_.” With a pause meant entirely for effect, Loki gave the lightest of chuckles as he lined up another shot. “With you, and this world, and this entire damned life.”

Loki knew he’d hit his mark when Thor stilled, skin turning parchment-white. “You weren’t done. Not even with the task at hand. Don’t lie to me, Loki, _you were not done_.”

“Fine.” He wanted to stop smiling, but he could give up his mockery no more than he could his misery. “No, I wasn’t.”

For all he spent his life predicting the moves of others, working ten steps before every other on his path, in that moment he had no true idea of what Thor would actually do. Like a bystander he could only watch, and wonder – and then, almost as if on cue, Thor stepped forward and into place.

There was no inherent threat in the movement, but for all there were always those who mocked him for an effeminate coward, Loki had been trained as a warrior. The long knives hidden up his sleeves slid into his hands, the grips familiar comfort. They didn’t remain there long. Thor’s strong fingers and wide palms came about his raised wrists in swift counter, squeezing with near-crippling strength. Yet even as they fell Loki let laughter rip itself loose from the last shreds of his dignity.

“Those are not my only weapons,” he said, almost giddy; Thor’s answering frown felt as dire as Loki’s own damnation.

“Yet they are not what you went for first.”

“My magics are merely depleted, Thor. They are not exhausted.” He didn’t bother to mask his glee. That edge of insanity prickled against Thor’s sensibilities; he shook him, as if to rattle some sense back into his troubled head.

“And yet you would raise them against me? Even if it would only hurt yourself at least as much?”

“If it becomes necessary.”

“Why?” _You fool_ , Loki thought, even as Thor allowed his hurt to show almost as much as his anger. “ _Why_ , Loki? Because I wish to save you from yourself?”

For a moment he could not see for the red veil of utter fury that had descended over his vision. Even as he feared he’d lost control over even that, that he’d at last reverted to Jotun form permanently, Loki tried to rip himself free from his brother’s grip. “Is _that_ why you did it?” The fine bones of his wrists ground together, and still Thor did not let go. “Is that why you came racing to my rescue like a hero in a fairytale, berserker blood pounding through your damned Aesir veins as you sought to rescue the most worthless example of your people’s greatest enemy?” Reversing tactics, Loki stepped forward, almost nose to nose with him. “Is it perhaps because you believed that saving me would mean I’d feel myself indebted to you, and to your damned desire to drag me back to a realm that is no longer a place that would ever welcome one of my blood?”

And damn him, for not flinching under the rising volume of Loki’s bitter accusations.

“You shout these things at me like they even matter. As if you believe the louder you shout, the more they will matter.”

“They matter.”

Thor shook his head, unmoved even in the face of Loki’s shaking, stuttering fury. “I tell you now, they do not.”

“They matter to me,” Loki shot back, and Thor could not stop shaking his stupid thick head. Misery and confused warred together, giving his blue eyes a deep sheen of bewildered pain.

“As you matter to me,” he said, low. “ _That_ is why I saved you, Loki. Because you are my brother and I love you.”

The words felt like daggers forced under his skin, their silver serrations rasping harsh against the limits of his very soul. “Why must you beat that dead horse, over and over?” He yanked backward, knowing he could call upon what remained of his magics even as he felt somehow unable to. Instead, he used his last and most potent weapon. “Saying such things over and over will not make them true! Even I, the silver-tongued liesmith, understand that mere words cannot undo reality itself!”

Those damned blue eyes, pale of colour and so damnably utter _pure_ of purpose, would not release him any more than would his great grasping hands. “Then what can?”

He turned his face away even as Thor leaned closer. “Let go of me, Thor.”

“Loki, damn you, I will not let you leave me again.” The pronouncement escaped him in a low hiss, breath hot against his cheek. “You will always be my brother.”

It hit him with all the condemnation of an executioner’s axe; snapping his head around he drew a deep breath, screamed with force, “I’m _not_ your brother!”

He’d said those words what felt a thousand times already. Yet in that moment something in the balance of them changed. Mired in the resultant silence, with Thor but another breath, another heartbeat away, Loki rolled the words around his mouth before he tried again.

And when he spoke once more, they had changed utterly. Low and wondering, they spilled from his lips like quicksilver burnt gold by the sun to which it had strayed too close.

“I’m not your _brother_.”

Thor’s eyes flared, and Loki realised he’d likely made a terrible miscalculation. Then, all sense and proof were lost when he leaned up and Thor leaned down. He’d not lied, when he’d told those foolish mortals the tale of the first time he’d kissed his brother. But it was nothing compared to the maelstrom of that moment.

When he’d read of love in books and listened to it described by the great epic verse spoken across the banquet tables of Asgard, Loki had dismissed most of the power attributed to it as foolish sentimentality. Oh, there was _influence_ in love, certainly – but it was as much an illusion as his own magics, simply a way to twist emotion and devotion into perceived duty and compulsion. True love was no more than a bond between individuals, forged by time and blood and affection. Anything else was either over-romanticism, or mere obsession.

Yet in that moment, when the kiss broke and his heart ached for the separation of it, Loki cast his head back and wanted nothing more than to howl his misery to the sky even as he filled with desperate, leaping, pure _joy_. Only one word could describe that feeling – and only one word escaped his lips, an incantation as much as it was a confession.

“ _Thor_.”

A distant noise, a clatter of sorts, reached his ears. Yet it didn’t matter, not with Thor’s lips upon his leaping pulse and their bodies pressed together like they were held that way by the branches of Yggdrasil itself. Still, sense crept into his thoughts, silver and harsh against the golden warmth of Thor’s presence.

“We cannot do this here,” he said, his breath harsh and ragged as he hissed the words into his damned brother’s ear. His own matching thought felt tattered and torn. _This is not what I planned, at all._

Thor gave a quick breath, shook his head. “We’re not meant to feel this way,” he murmured, a half-whisper; though he spoke to himself, it was a bitter knife plunged into Loki’s heart.

“And it’s all my fault.”

“I did not say—”

He gave him no room to answer. Clenching hands tight into his shoulders, Loki gritted his teeth and summoned what little magic remained to him. The world shifted and a moment later the roof had gone, a new environment raising itself around them.

The hotel room was nothing so grand as the chambers that had been his in Asgard, but then nothing on Midgard could ever hope to match the grandiose glory or arching majesty of Aesir-wrought architecture. Loki missed it. He hated himself for acknowledging that. But he missed it all the same.

Releasing his grip on him just enough to look about, Thor appeared only slightly disoriented. “This is where you have been all this time?”

“Not all this time.” Even with his brother’s hands still on his body, Loki felt a distance growing between them once more. “You have no idea what has happened to me between my fall and your arrival.”

“So tell me,” he whispered, and Loki laughed fit to tear a new hole in his sanity.

“You hate me enough,” he said instead, and Thor groaned, burying his head in the crook of his neck.

“Why do you always believe the worst of me, Loki?” The deep voice was muffled by leather and metal, yet Loki heard every word as clear as Heimdall’s all-seeing eyes. “I’ve never hated you. I never _could_ hate you.”

“Even for this?”

At first Thor did not answer. Then, when he looked up, the tortured expression on his face brought Loki almost as much joy as it did grief. “What _is_ this?”

“You tell me.”

The mobile lips thinned, set themselves into implacable harbingers of truth. “Love.”

“This is not _love_ —”

There was no room to finish. Thor’s lips silenced him with desperate strength and then they were both falling; the great bed provided their only respite from the hard wooden floor below it. Loki fought back all the same, knowing Thor’s greater weight would always push him back, always hold him down. Though he’d heard Mjölnir drop to the floor, the sensation reminded him of that moment on the rainbow bridge when Thor had immobilised him with its weight.

“Not worthy,” he murmured, bitter as a drowning mouthful of saltwater. Thor stiffened, rose up on his arms as he paused, took in what was truly happening between them.

“We…” The great throat worked, words choked with the unpronounceable depths of raw emotion. “We should not do this.”

“No. We shouldn’t.” He braced his hands against his shoulders, shoved hard. “So get off me.”

Yet Thor did not move – not to end it, but neither to continue. Scorn danced upon the tip of Loki’s tongue for an indecisive moment. Then, he let it go forth to wound and dismember in his stead.

“Would this be easier if I weren’t in this form?” With mocking ease he released a glamour so innate to his existence he often could forget it was there. As his Jotun form came to the fore, he gave an apologetic smile as mercurial as the change of his skin and soul. Thor’s gasp cut through him like ice. “Oh, my apologies. I’m a monster like this. Perhaps _this_ might prove easier, more suited to your tastes.”

Soft, feminine curves swelled beneath the passage of one contemptuous hand. There was nothing soft about the way he pressed them against his brother, nails digging into his armour as if desperate to rake into the vulnerable flesh below. “Or is this still not good enough for you? Can’t you pretend, even when I’m just another convenient female to fuck and forget?”

A low curse escaped his throat before his palms pressed against either side of his face, holding it immobile so the only place Loki could look was into Thor’s eyes. “Stop it, Loki. _Stop it_.”

He could have just closed them. Yet childish, desperate defiance kept his own eyes open, staring even as he jerked his feminine hips upward.

“Go back.” Thor gasped as Loki thrust his chest upward, breath ragged and bleeding. “Go back to what you were before.”

“There is no going back,” he sneered, though he reverted forms. Then, he smiled to show all his teeth. “ _Brother._ ”

The challenge he tendered was answered by a kiss of bruising force. It should have hurt, Loki thought vaguely, but then all lesser forms of pain were nothing compared to the screaming ache of his head, and of his heart – and even his twice-damned Jotun soul.

The sinuous press of Thor’s body against his set the blood burning hotly in his veins, despite his origins. _But then ice can burn as much as fire_ , he thought, vague and random. But even as his own body responded, goading Thor’s ever onward, he knew neither could last long – not after the exhaustions of the day, not with his over-spent mana. But that was just one reason why he knew he had erred, and erred deeply. From the beginning he’d realised the need to provoke Thor’s temper to instigate anything of this intensity, of this consequence. Yet he’d calculated for that, because he’d wanted far greater control than what he had now.

In a peculiar, unsettling fashion it reminded him of the Bifröst storm, of the endless fall he begun to think would never end. So much time, so much knowledge, so much knowing – and all of it just out of his reach. Beneath the weight of Thor’s body and guilt and fear and fury and _love_ , Loki knew they’d both been taken up by the storms of fate, mere toys to be tossed and turned and twisted inside out by a force greater than even two gods of opposing worlds.

“I’ve made a mistake,” he whispered to the sky outside their Midgardian window, but then Thor’s lips were on his. Loki gave in to what he had started and just let go.

Hips jerked together, one strong thigh now insinuating between his. On instinct Loki rubbed his groin against it, the hard length unmistakable despite the leather between them. With a shuddering gasp he reached one hand down from where both had been fisted in Thor’s hair, grasped one working buttock, and pulled him closer. His brother _groaned_ , the sound resonating in two mouths instead of one, and Loki broke the kiss to gulp for air that seemed utterly inadequate for its purpose.

“Thor…Thor, I…”

There was no true need to ask. Their unspoken desires called to one another in clear silent voices, two matched halves of a still-broken whole. One hand moved between them; searching, it held true to its path. Loki still reached down to join the hunt. Kisses metamorphosed into bites and back again, tongues and lips and teeth in endless skirmish as their fingers grappled and grasped and fought to free themselves from the restrictions of their respective armour.

Thor had greater practice, it seemed; he was first. Loki cursed. He was _always_ first, even in this. But then his own member sprang free and it didn’t matter because Thor crushed his fingers in his own, tightly wrapping the ragged tangle of fingers about their cocks.

The heat of him cut into Loki like the blade of Surtur. Even as he gasped, even as he moaned, he thought of Jotunheim, of the cold that had flowed into him the moment the damned Frost Giant had destroyed his armour and revealed his deepest and most secret nature to the world. He had never been truly warm again since. But, in this, he _burned_.

The motion of should have hurt. Neither had paused long enough to think of comfort, to think of lubrication; even as Loki tried to do something to remedy it his magics only sparked, gave little. But it didn’t matter. Pleasure and pain had never seemed less distinct with his brother above him, rutting like an animal even as he himself writhed beneath like a wanton.

_Can you see this, Heimdall? Can you see this…Father?_

The worst thing, he thought dimly, was that he didn’t even know himself. The glittering sheen of his skin gave his entire body an odd, floating aura of emerald-green: uncontained magic bleeding from his very soul, loosed to the air of a world not his own. Loki raised a trembling hand, let it fall; his fingers left a faint trail like fallen stars in their wake, and he choked back something that could have been a laugh, could have been a sob, could have been something as simple as a sigh. Sex could have an odd effect on those so inclined, but Loki’s life had always been about control.

He had no control now as Thor jerked them both hard, the throbbing heat of his brother’s cock rigid and giving against his own, iron wrapped in velvet. That burning grip lent a quick, short rhythm, one born of a knowing finesse that held Loki prisoner to its pleasure like iron to a lodestone. _It’s how he touches himself_ , he thought dimly, but even then he knew it could not be the truth. In all the nine realms there could be nothing else like this.

“Brother,” he whispered, “brother, please.”

Thor paused for only the briefest fraction of a second. Then, he squeezed. _Hard_. Loki’s whole body arched like a bow, his orgasm loosed at last. With his head thrown back, hips grinding upward into Thor’s as he pushed downward, he knew the truth of them both at last: an immutable force in pitched battle against an unmovable object. And for him, at least, the battle was over.

 _I’m first_ , he thought, dazed, even as he felt the pulse of Thor’s release warm and thick between their bellies, heard the groan as teeth closed about his armour-clad shoulder. _In this, at least, I was first_.

Almost immediately he wondered if that meant he’d lost.

Thor rose from their embrace before he even thought of letting go. Each movement was slow, but not languid; the rigours of the day had stolen much of his inherent leonine grace. As the cool night air replaced the warmth of his brother Loki thought Thor would rise from the bed, would go to the bathing chamber to wash himself. Instead, his weight tilted his side of the bed downward as he leaned over Loki. His words were a gentle, half-spoken rumble of sound and deep-set emotion.

“Let me do this for you.”

With swift, knowing fingers wiped clean upon tissue taken from the bedside cabinet, Thor began to remove Loki’s armour. He moved with grace that might have been surprising to someone who had not known how naturally war and all its attendant mysteries came to someone like Thor. Someone like his damnable mortal woman.

 _But I think you are beginning to understand_. Loki stared at the ceiling, eyes working over the patterns there, and felt the beat of an approaching headache behind his eyes like the relentless striking of a war drum. _Yes, Dr. Foster, I think you may understand far more than I’ll ever wish to give you credit for_.

Beneath Thor’s ministrations Loki felt like a crab being cracked open in order that the soft inner flesh might be devoured whole. Yet there was no violence, no sense of fear in it: he removed it slowly, near-reverently. It made him wonder why he’d dressed in Asgardian garb even as he’d denied that realm its continued hold over him. _I say I’m Jotnar_ , he thought bleakly, _but in the end I’ll always wish I could be the Aesir I was before I tried to pull Thor down from the pedestal I helped put him on._

“I’m not really a very good liar, you know.”

Thor displayed no surprise at his brother’s sudden words. “I know.” Setting the last piece aside at last he paused in his work, leaving Loki in only the light undershirt and leggings worn beneath the heavy outer shell. With his head bowed in the shadow of the deepening night, Loki could not see his face. “You should bathe, brother. And then you should rest. There is still much work to be done, upon the morrow.”

A bitter thread reworked itself back into the snarled tapestry of his thoughts. “And you?”

“I will survive.”

He tried to sit up, but even before his overwrought body could protest the movement Thor leaned over from his place upon the edge of the bed, laid a hand upon his shoulder, and pressed him firmly down again. Loki’s lips thinned in deep disapproval. “You need to rest at least as much as I do.”

He shook his head, long hair brushing over broad armoured shoulders. “I should return to the others.”

“There are many things you _should_ do.” Staring at the ceiling, he hated his brother even as he realised he’d never loved him more. “There are many things you _could_ do. Does that necessarily mean that you _will_ do any of them?”

“You were always too quick with words for me to keep up, Loki, even when we were both mere children.”

“I took my victories where I could get them.”

He stared towards the side now, away from Thor. The night sky beyond the opened windows felt like a siren-song as the curtains stirred in the night breeze, cool even in the desert. Its chill kiss felt welcome against his overheated skin. He’d always preferred the cold, and the stars spangled overhead, for all their bright watchful light, were as ice.

“You could always shield yourself from Heimdall’s sight, when you willed it,” Thor said, sudden. Loki scowled, though he did not think it hid his upswell of misery as well as he hoped it did.

“Are you asking if I kept that shield over both of us now?” he asked, turning an accusing stare upon him. “Why, Thor? Are you ashamed of what you’ve become? Of what I’ve done to you?”

Weary as a god condemned to carry the weight of a world not his own upon his shoulders alone, Thor drooped. Again, Loki could not see his bowed face, but the hands dangling between his knees were still. “Please. I cannot do this now, Loki.”

“You never could.”

The bitter words appeared to drive him upward. As soon as he’d regained his feet Thor’s hands rose with slow grace to begin to stripping off his own armour. Loki turned his back, curling like a kitten as he wrapped his arms about himself. Closing his eyes hardly helped as he listened to the familiar clink and chink as each piece of armour was laid aside.

At last, it was done. “I am going to bathe,” Thor said, quiet and strange in the renewed silence between them. Loki snorted softly into the softness of the pillow beneath his cheek.

“From all the damned noise you made, I had already divined as much.”

“If you wish to join me…”

Uncertainty gave his words deep power. Loki started, then rolled over and upward in one smooth motion despite the ache of his heavy limbs. “How do you propose to wash away the sin of our joining,” he said, scathing, “if I am there beside you the entire time?”

Thor, dressed only in his undertrousers, seemed more silver than gold in the cold light of the Midgardian starscape. “Love is not a sin,” he said, and his eyes were as blue as the sky of the world they’d both left behind in the wake of both. “If this is how I may keep you by my side, Loki, then do not doubt my sincerity: I _will_ do it. For you.”

“I don’t need your pity.” He rolled over again, closed his eyes tight. “I’ll bathe later. I must sleep now.”

For a long moment there was only silence. The closing of the door seemed scarcely better, when at last it came.

Alone once more, Loki opened his eyes and found them quite filled with the damnable stars of this even more damnable realm. Even when he closed them again he could feel their cold silver light, could hear still the hum of Mjölnir not four feet from the bed he’d shared with its master. He closed his eyes tighter. But the light was in him now, burning and relentless and as unforgiving as his own self-loathing.

_I don’t need your pity, Thor. But in the end we all know I’ll take whatever I can get._

**Author's Note:**

> So, basically, Loki's one messed up woobie son of a bitch.
> 
> With that said, even though I wrote this a couple of weeks ago it fits quite nicely with a conversation I got into on tumblr the other day about how aware Thor is, of the way Loki can and does manipulate him. While it's fair enough to assume Thor doesn't know, I am of the school that believes Thor's often quite aware Loki behaves in such a way as to influence Thor into doing what Loki wants him to do. I just also believe that Thor accepts this because a) it's just what Loki _does_ and b) he trusts Loki. He's acting on the belief that Loki's judgement is sound, and that Loki does things this way instead of just ASKING because...well, because Loki just needs his little games.
> 
> At this point, however, even Loki's kind of forgotten the rules.


End file.
